Moodle integration with Live at Edu

This is a slightly delayed note about the integration of our instance of Moodle with Live@Edu.
In the second half of 2009 the Faculty of Education had highlighted the need for a certain group of their alumni to get continued access to specific areas of LearnOnline (Moodle). To date, this had not been possible as students' accounts are turned off after they graduated. However, the University had gone live with Live@Edu in January, which gave students accounts 'for life' with the Microsoft Live services.
We were lucky with the timing, in that Microsoft Education labs released their "Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle" just a few days later, on Tuesday the 21st of July (the day after a different area of Microsoft released some drivers for Linux under the GPL).

Ashley Holman from Netspot had a look at it for us and after a short time had installed it for us on the development instance of Moodle. Microsoft kindly acknowledged Ashley's bug fixes in their next update, and in early January we implemented the integration in our production environment. This means, that as of mid-January, people who once used to be students here can log in to or Moodle.

There are two limitations to this, though: As we only started using Live@Edu at the beginning of 2009, only people who were students in 2009 (or later) have been provided with accounts, so unfortunately this solution does not allow graduates from earlier ears to log in.
The second limitation is that there won't be anything to see on Moodle, for these ex-students. As they are not enrolled, they don't get access to courses, and almost all old courses are closed off after the end of teaching. So there are only a few ex-students who currently use our Moodle this way.

We have however received a number of requests from lecturers to create courses in Moodle for entire degree cohorts. As such, Ashley is working on extending our Moodle-Callista integration to allow us to enrol students based on their degree program. In combination with the Live@Edu integration, this could be used to develop strong links between alumni and current students, and areas such as Secondary Education are leading the way.